Living with Distrust. Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village, Oxford University Press, 2022
Abstract
People in the Romanian village of Sateni distrust each other so much, that they would rather take a building apart than share it. Satenis think of life as struggle for scarce resources—a struggle that can lead to deception, exploitation, or predation. Cooperation with unrelated or unfamiliar partners fails while distrust permeates everyday life and cultural representations. Yet, each person engages in profound relationships with a particular set of people, expressed in cooperative actions. Living in Distrust makes sense of this worldview-one divided between strong moral relationships and deep suspicion towards the rest of the village society-through an ethnography of distrust.
Drawing on two years of fieldwork, Radu Umbres offers an interdisciplinary interpretation of social interactions in a low trust society. This cognitive ethnography argues that the costs of misplaced trust made Sateni restrict their cooperative behavior to a safe set of social relationships: family, kinship, and friendship ties. Umbres explains how mutual trust appears by social agreement around culturally-codified institutions and persists only by fair cooperative interactions. Despite scarce representations or investments in the common good, the village society reproduces its low-level equilibrium of cooperation in relative stability. In an exploration of the structural influences on community morality and a defense of distrust, the book also demonstrates how investing trust in family first is an optimal strategy against ecological or political risks.
By highlighting a system of dual morality sharply distinct from the Western-liberal ethos, Living with Distrust addresses perennial moral dilemmas and essential questions of secrecy and honesty, distrust and reputation.
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A Continent Moving West? argues that the conceptualization of migration as a one-way or long-term process is becoming increasingly wide of the mark. Rather, east-west labor migration in Europe, in common perhaps with other flows in and from other parts of the world, is diverse, fluid, and influenced by the dynamics of local and sector-specific labor markets and migration-related political regulations. The papers in this book contribute to critical understanding of the east-west migration within the European Union after the 2004 enlargement, from the new to the old member states.
When we deceive others, are we using them as tools? After all, when we deceive, we use others as means to our ends, irrespective of their intentions and welfare. But I argue that such a view is only superficially valid once we consider the mechanisms of deception as a form of social agency. A more insightful understanding of deception must account for the interlocking of agency between deceiver and deceived at several levels,
based on uniquely human meta-representational capacities.
Children show stronger cooperative behavior in experimental settings as they get older, but little is known about how the environment of a child shapes this development. In adults, prosocial behavior toward strangers is markedly decreased in low socio-economic status (SES) neighborhoods, suggesting that environmental harshness has a negative impact on some prosocial behaviors. Similar results have been obtained with 9-year-olds recruited from low vs. high SES schools. In the current study, we investigate whether these findings generalize to a younger age group and a developing country. Specifically, we worked with a sample of thirty-nine 6- to 7-year-olds in two neighborhoods in a single city in Romania. Using a “Quality Dictator Game” that offers greater resolution than previous measures, we find that children living in the harsher neighborhood behave less prosocially toward a stranger than children living in the less harsh neighborhood.
Contemporary immigrants can not be characterized as the "uprooted'. Many are transmigrants, becoming firmly rooted in their new country but maintaining multiple linkages to their homeland. In the US, anthropologists are engaged in building a transnational anthropology and rethinking their data on immigration. Migration proves to be an important transnational process that reflects and contributes to the current political configurations of the emerging global economy. In this article, the authors use studies of migration from St. Vincent, Grenada, the Philippines, and Haiti to the US to delineate some of the parameters of an ethnography of transnational migration and explore the reasons for and the implications of transnational migrations. The authors conclude that the transnational connections of immigrants provide a subtext of the public debates in the US about the merits of immigration. -Authors
This article points at the path to modernization of the recent Romanian households, meaning, in this case, the out ruling of productive activities from the household’s space and time (Max Weber). A brief social history of the household (gospodărie) tries to trace back this longue durée process focusing on the shift in the work ethics from a normative model of the ‘good householder’ to an ‘aesthetisation of life’ (Max Weber) and symbolic emancipation. The main interest of the article concerns the relatively new phenomenon of ‘rustic houses’, which is less an architectural, than a lifestyle choice. Contrasted with the former ‘pride houses’ that spread all over the Romanian villages in the last decade, the peasant rustic taste seems to express a kind of return to the local and the past articulated with a modern concern for comfort and appearance: ‘rustic is traditional and modern in the same time!’ – claimed one of our informants. Rusticity thus becomes a (post)modern simulacrum of genuine peasant life. The final part of the article tries to transcend this mere semantic overview in search of its deeper and subjective motivations. In doing so, the article is approaching these recent rural households in the terms of Axel Honneth’s social recognition theory. It also suggests that, in this respect, the rustic taste expresses an existential search for authenticity.
This paper analyzes the transformations in Romanian parties' legislative recruitment strategies that are likely to occur with the change in the electoral system, by looking at the 2008 parliamentary elections and the data gathered from questionnaires with the new MPs. The main finding is a general move towards more local patronage-oriented recruitment, determined by the importance in this process of local party officials (presidents of county councils and mayors) as well as of private sponsors. The new electoral system seems to decrease the chances of women getting elected, while parties chose to delegate much of the campaigning costs, thus favoring well-to-do candidates. Scores of decentralization and inclusiveness of selectorates are computed and the article proposes a series of explanations for the intra-party mutations since 2004, when the last empirical study was conducted on the Romanian legislative recruitment.
The ritual animal longs to belong. Rituals are a way of defining the boundaries of social groups and binding their members together. The ritual modes theory set out in this book seeks to unravel the psychology behind these processes, and to explain how ritual behaviour evolved, including how different modes of ritual performance have shaped global history over many millennia. Testing the theory has meant designing experiments run with children in psychology labs and on remote Pacific islands, gathering survey data with armed insurgents in the Middle East and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia, monitoring heart rate and stress among football fans in Brazil, and measuring changes in the brain as people observe traditional Chinese rituals in Singapore. The results of all this research point to new ways of addressing cooperation problems: from preventing violent extremism to motivating action on the climate crisis. Although this book is about the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity, more broadly it models a new approach to the science of the social—an approach that is driven by real-world observation but grounded in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. More ambitiously still, it shows how cumulative theory building can be used to deliver practical benefits for society at large, perhaps even addressing problems on a global scale by harnessing the formidable cohesive and cooperative capacities of the ritual animal.
We conduct trust games in three villages in a northeastern Romanian commune. From 1775–1919, these villages were arbitrarily assigned to opposite sides of the Austrian and Ottoman/Russian border despite being located seven kilometers apart. This plausibly exogenous border assignment affected local institutions and late-18th century migration in a manner that likely also affected trust. Conditional on trust norms being affected by these centuries-old historical circumstances, our experimental design tests the degree to which such norms are transmitted intergenerationally. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that participants on the Austrian side that also have family roots in the village are indeed more likely to trust outsiders.
A collection of specially commissioned essays dealing with general aspects of kinship, family and marriage from an anthropological point of view, that is, considering the total range of human societies. In his editorial introduction, Jack Goody explains that his aim has been to provide 'essays dealing with general themes rather than ethnographic conundrums or descriptive minutiae' in the hope of achieving 're-consideration of some central problem areas including those examined by an earlier generation of anthropologists and still raised by scholars outside the discipline itself'. Individual essays cover problems such as the nature of kinship and the family; why monogamy?; intermarriage and the creation of castes. The contributors include R. G. Abrahams, J. A. Barnes, Fredrik Barth, Maurice Bloch, Derek Freeman, Jack Goody, Grace Harris, Jean La Fontaine, Edmund Leach, Julian Pitt-Rivers, Raymond T. Smith, Andrew Strathern and S. J. Tambiah.
Norms in the Wild takes a unique look at social norms, answering questions about diagnosis (how can we tell that a shared practice is a social norm?), measurement (how do we measure expectations and preferences?), and change (which tools can we adopt to effect norm change?). The theories developed in the book are brought to life by examining real-life cases of norm creation and abandonment, the rationale behind policy interventions, and how change can be spearheaded by various types of trendsetters, be they individuals, groups, or the media. By exploring how a range of problems, from poor sanitation to child marriage, can be addressed, the book shows how social norms can have a causal impact on collective behavior, and which interventions may succeed in creating new norms or abandoning harmful ones. In laying the theoretical groundwork for implementing social changes in a contextually sensitive and empirically based way, it also diagnoses why some less culturally attuned attempts to eliminate negative practices have failed.
As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.
Although the dominant paradigm of immigrant employment views immigrants as clustered in a limited number of occupations or industries that comprise a niche, the explanations of how immigrants enter and establish these niches remain incomplete. While most researchers emphasize the importance of social networks, the social network approach begs the issue of how to account for the insertion and consolidation of immigrant networks as opposed to those dominated by incumbent native workers. This article seeks to answer this question through a case study of immigrant professional employees in New York City government. I argue that the growth of this immigrant niche resulted from changes in the relative supply of native workers and in the structure of employment, which opened the bureaucracy to immigrants and reduced native/immigrant competition. These shifts opened hiring portals; given the advantages of network hiring for workers and managers, and an immigrant propensity for government employment, network recruitment led to a rapid buildup in immigrant ranks.
These essays are mainly concerned with the development of some of Max Gluckman's ideas about African politics. He regarded frequent rebellions to replace incumbents of political offices (as against revolutions to alter the structure of offices) as inherent in these politics. Later he connected this situation with modes of husbandry, problems of the devolution of power, types of weapons and the law of treason. He advanced to a general theory of ritual, as well as to general propositions about the position of officials representing conflicting interests within a hierarchy, typified by the African chief under colonial rule. Originally published in 1963.
What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators’ minds, violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social relationships according to cultural precepts, precedents, and prototypes. These moral motivations apply equally to the violence of the heroes of the Iliad, to parents smacking their child, and to many modern murders and everyday acts of violence. Virtuous Violence presents a wide-ranging exploration of violence across different cultures and historical eras, demonstrating how people feel obligated to violently create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships in order to make them right, according to morally motivated cultural ideals.
Friends-they are generous and cooperative with each other in ways that appear to defy standard evolutionary expectations, frequently sacrificing for one another without concern for past behaviors or future consequences. In this fascinating multidisciplinary study, Daniel J. Hruschka synthesizes an array of cross-cultural, experimental, and ethnographic data to understand the broad meaning of friendship, how it develops, how it interfaces with kinship and romantic relationships, and how it differs from place to place. Hruschka argues that friendship is a special form of reciprocal altruism based not on tit-for-tat accounting or forward-looking rationality, but rather on mutual goodwill that is built up along the way in human relationships.
The Naval vessel at sea is described as a total institution of the type that justifies itself on instrumental grounds. The structure and function of the formal and informal shipboard organizations, and· the expectations therein of the role of the sailor, are discussed. Special attention is given to the processes by which the individual is assimilated into the shipboard society, and to his behavioral modifications of the expected role.
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Why is business ownership common in some immigrant groups, but rare in others? Building on organizational ecology, it may be argued that the immigrant group acts as an economic niche for small business. Large groups provide a more favorable niche for ethnic entrepreneurs than small groups, because large groups provide large specialized ethnic markets. Groups whose members are not fluent in the dominant language provide more favorable niches for immigrant entrepreneurs, because they provide a linguistically isolated labor pool whose skills can be more efficiently tapped by coethnic rather than majority group entrepreneurs. Because of its large and heterogeneous immigrant population, Australia is a particularly appropriate site for testing these hypotheses. With a one-percent Public Use Sample of the 1981 Australian Census, a multilevel logistic regression model predicts individuals' probabilities of business ownership as a function of the size of the group (ethnic market size), the percent of the group who speak English badly (the linguistically isolated labor pool), and the individual's own language skills and human capital characteristics. The results support both hypotheses.
Infants understand harm and fairness in third-party situations and yet children require years of development before they apply this understanding to their own interactions with others. We suggest that the delay is explained by a life-history analysis of when behaving morally becomes beneficial. The human species is characterized by an extended period of juvenile dependence during which cooperation with non-kin is mostly superfluous. Later, as children age, moral behaviors supporting cooperation become increasingly beneficial.
From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co‐operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from an evolutionary and a cognitive point of view.
In recent years, Romanians have become the second largest migrant group in Western Europe. Following the liberalization of border controls and the massive economic and political changes in Eastern Europe, human mobility has increased and is becoming a permanent feature of post-Cold War Europe. The arrival of many Eastern Europeans, with Romanians being the largest migrant group, has produced public concerns on immigration in some West European countries. This is particularly the case in Italy, where Romanian irregular migrants are often stigmatized as poor troublemakers by authorities and the mass media. This book challenges such commonly-held assumptions that artificially divide migrants into categories of wished and unwished immigrants— winners and losers of international migration.
This book compares two migrant groups. The first is composed of ethnic Germans who migrated legally from Timisoara, Romania, to Nuremberg, Germany. The second is made up of those who migrated irregularly from Borsa, Romania, to Milan, Italy. The analysis highlights a paradoxical situation. Irregular Romanian migrants in Milan had fewer rights and opportunities, yet through migration they gained prestige and came to enjoy a sense of success. Alternately, the Germans who had migrated to Nuremberg, who received more rights and opportunities, perceived that they had suffered a loss of social prestige. The focus on migrants’ social status employed in the book seeks to clarify this puzzle and provide an analytical framework for researching the linkages between the migration and incorporation of Romanians—who are today European citizens—and European states’ migration policies and migrant transnationalism.
Romania reformed the law governing its parliamentary elections between 2004 and 2008, shifting from a complex proportional representation system based on county-level party lists to a complex uninominal system in which each district for the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate elects one representative. The change in law emerged after more than a year of heated political controversies, including partisan and personal animosity between President Basescu and Prime Minister Tariceanu, a failed attempt at impeachment, a deadlocked special electoral commission, a failed popular referendum, an unfavorable constitutional court ruling, and a confusing final accord brokered under deadline. Qualitative comparison of the 2004 and 2008 laws reveals that the heralded reform merely added an additional layer of calculation to the previous electoral system. Quantitative analysis using counterfactual estimation reveals that the new law had absolutely zero effect on the partisan outcome. In the conclusion, we explore the implications of these findings for Romanian politics and the politics of electoral reform more generally.
This paper relates quality and uncertainty. The existence of goods of many grades poses interesting and important problems for the theory of markets. On the one hand, the interaction of quality differences and uncertainty may explain important institutions of the labor market. On the other hand, this paper presents a struggling attempt to give structure to the statement: “Business in under-developed countries is difficult”; in particular, a structure is given for determining the economic costs of dishonesty. Additional applications of the theory include comments on the structure of money markets, on the notion of “insurability,” on the liquidity of durables, and on brand-name goods.